Huffington Post: Long-Term Drought Doomed Indus Valley Civilization, Researchers SayI’ve had a mild obsession with the Indus Valley civilization ever since I took an archaeology course on it in college. This headline is a bit ridiculous, of course. What researchers say is that they’ve found evidence of a 200 year long drought that happened about 4,000 years ago. While it is very likely that this data is correct, they still need some more corroboration to say for certain that an ancient climatic event ‘doomed’ the Harappans.

LiveScience: Red-Seeing Fish, Blue-Seeing Fish: Deep-Sea Vision Evolves“The deep sea is not the sort of environment that would appear to encourage rapid evolution. “It doesn’t change. It is always dark,” said study researcher Christopher Kenaley, a comparative biologist at Harvard University. “There is something else down there that is driving the evolution of the visual system.””

University of Louisville: UofL Engineers Construct 3D Heart ModelThis is actually a video. I came across a very poorly written article on the subject, and went looking for real information on the subject. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Daily Dot: If you stopped watching ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’ you’re missing outWe may have to pick Agents of SHIELD up again. It wasn’t so much that we stopped watching it on purpose as that it slipped down the list of priority shows we’ve been working through as time allows. We’re currently racing through Clone Wars to be ready for the release of Season 6 on Netflix in a few weeks, and we aren’t watching anything else until that’s done.
“The big picture here (aside from Marvel’s ongoing quest to obliterate all other summer blockbuster movies) is that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has changed. A lot. You don’t even have to have seen a single episode to work this out.

At the beginning of the series, the reactions from fans on social media were lacklustre to say the least, and interest from geek culture critics was quickly waning. Four months on, the latest episode is inspiring the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth that’s usually reserved for Comic Con teaser trailers.”

RH Reality Check: Alabama House Passes Extreme ‘Heartbeat’ Abortion Ban, Three Other Anti-Choice Bills“The heartbeat bill’s sponsor, Mary McClurkin (R-Indian Springs), came under heavy fire from her Black colleagues after she compared her bill to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended legal racial segregation in the United States. The point of McClurkin’s remarks appeared to be that abortion constitutes “discrimination” against a fetus, and that bills like hers could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson.”

Mother Jones: Here Are 5 Infuriating Examples of Facts Making People Dumber“Together, all of these studies support the theory of “motivated reasoning”: The idea that our prior beliefs, commitments, and emotions drive our responses to new information, such that when we are faced with facts that deeply challenge these commitments, we fight back against them to defend our identities. So next time you feel the urge to argue back against some idiot on the Internet…pause, take a deep breath, and realize not only that arguing might not do any good, but that in fact, it might very well backfire.”